Month: November 2013

T.M. Luhrman, the Stanford anthropologist, recently published essays sympathetic to the religious practice of “speaking in tongues” and to American evangelicals’ penchant for portraying a “personal, intimate God.” Leon Wieseltier responds with a withering critique, describing Luhrman as “peddling another intellectual argument for anti-intellectualism, another glorification of emotion in a culture enslaved to emotion”:

Luhrmann not only studies tongues, she also endorses tongues: “Speaking in tongues might actually be a more effective way to pray than speaking in ordinary language.” The difficulty is that God cannot be adequately captured in language. Religious thinkers since Philo have been wrestling with the incomprehensibility of any concept of the deity that appropriately honors its sublimity. Luhrmann proposes that we give up and babble. “As a technique,” she explains, “tongues capture the attention but focus it on something meaningless (but understood by the speaker to be divine).” Myself, I would rather my nonsense not be sacred and my sacred not be nonsense. “There’s plenty here to alarm secular liberals,” she writes, invoking the stereotype that is designed to embarrass all skepticism. Actually, there’s plenty here to alarm religious conservatives, too.

Many of the world’s great religious traditions have consecrated themselves to the ideal of spiritual articulateness, and to the discovery of valid propositional content for the substance of faith. All this, for Luhrmann, is only “abstract and intellectual,” when it is merely the natural activity of thinking creatures who seek.

“The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated,” Luhrmann declares, “as anthropologists have long known.” Who gave anthropology the last word? This is like saying that the role of beauty in art is greatly overstated because there is so much ugliness in art. My fellow Americans, there are questions that do not allow of empirical answers! I leave aside the place of ideas in the evangelicism that Luhrmann adores. Are we really suffering from a surfeit of thoughtful belief? Have we been neglecting our felicity? “Secular liberalism,” with its demand for the justification of metaphysical opinions, has more to offer religion than the immediate gratifications of a credulous joyriding.

Luhrmann responds by defending the deeper spiritual meaning of “speaking in tongues”:

Wieseltier himself writes chidingly that “God cannot accurately be captured in language.” That is the point. When those who use a sacred language whose words they do not understand—speaking in tongues, but also chanting or reciting prayers in Hebrew, Arabic or Avestan—those words connect them to a God beyond understanding, a God for whom their words fall short. Many of those who pray in tongues prefer to say that they are “praying in the spirit.” One woman in the American evangelical church I studied told me that when she prayed in the spirit, she felt that she joined an angelic chorus that, most of the time, she could not hear. A woman in Ghana explained that she preferred to pray in tongues because those words had not been sullied by ordinary humans. “I am not communicating with any man.” Praying in this way reminds people that the God they reach for is sacred.

Now, to be honest, did I—raised Unitarian in an orthodox Jewish neighborhood—once think that speaking in tongues was pretty odd? Of course. I grew up moved by the sound of ancient language, but when I first encountered tongues, it seemed like babble. Yet I also think that some of the things I do for my own well-being—running hamster-like on a treadmill while watching figure skating reruns—look pretty peculiar to others, too. That’s the anthropological point. We’re all pretty odd to each other, and at its heart, life is mystery.

Rhys Southan surveys the growing genre of memoirs written by people who claim, through near-death experiences, to have glimpsed heaven and returned to tell the tale.  Southan notices that “[o]ne of the major problems with the heaven-and-back literature, at least for those looking to it for inspiration and hope, is that none of the people who have been there agree about what it’s like”:

One possible conclusion is that none of these people actually went to heaven. Call this the Hitchens/Harris/Challies view. It certainly has an intuitive appeal. For one thing, if they’re all sure they went to heaven, and they know that for instance you can or cannot see God’s face, why aren’t they criticizing the obvious frauds who either couldn’t or could? That they don’t all ferociously debate each other implies insecurities about their own visions.

Another possibility is that only one of them went to heaven, but then who to believe?

My money would be on either [Proof of Heaven author] Eben Alexander or [Waking Up in Heaven author] Crystal McVea. Both of them were skeptics before going to heaven, which makes them somehow more credible than a professional reverend like Oden Hetrick or the pastor’s son Colton Burpo who recounts his trip to heaven with the cold affectless demeanor of a psychopath. … Or it may be that there is no one definitive heaven because heaven is what each of us wants it to be. …

But there is another possible explanation for these inconsistencies that would answer the skeptical Christian’s concern that these books undercut the primacy of faith. Maybe God shows every visitor different heavens and tells them to write about these conflicting characters, activities, and landscapes because he’s up to his old mysteriousness business. Does God want to hint to us that heaven is really real, while teasing our craving for evidence by sending us garbled, contradictory messages about what’s actually there – forcing us to rely on faith again after all? Oh God, you sneaky devil you.

Reviewing Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch, Adam Shatz applauds the surprisingly dark first volume of the biography, writing that “each page is haunted by the demons that brought down the man known as Bird”:

The myth of Charlie Parker is that he was self-taught. In fact, as Crouch writes, he studied with a man named Alonzo Davis, an heir to a tradition of conservatory-trained black teachers who had “tattooed their knowledge on the brain cells of many young musicians who went on to shape the evolution of vernacular Negro American music.” Parker seems to have acquired a rapid—and highly exaggerated—sense of confidence on his horn. He was hardly married when he began to stay out all night in clubs, asking to sit in with local musicians when he only knew how to play “Lazy River” and “Honeysuckle Rose.” …

Parker began to find his voice on the alto, and to learn how to listen and respond “in digital time” to other musicians: the art that, as Crouch emphasizes, lies at the heart of his genius as an improviser. But he also discovered the pleasures that would kill him.

According to Crouch, Parker was first prescribed morphine around 1937, after a car accident in which he broke his ribs. A few months after [his wife] Rebecca became pregnant with their son Leon, he invited her to watch as he inserted a needle in his arm, then left for the night. That scene, chillingly described by Crouch, left Rebecca in little doubt about where his loyalties stood. Soon afterward she found a letter from another woman under his pillow; he asked her to return it at gunpoint. He gave her crabs and stole from her. When she miscarried their second child, he flushed it down the toilet. The family doctor told her that if he continued to use heroin, he would live no more than eighteen to twenty years: an accurate prediction.

Back in March, Mike Springer dug up the above video, “the only [known sound film] of him playing live, rather than synching to a prerecorded track”:

The performance is from a February 24, 1952 broadcast on the pioneering DuMont Television Network. The full segment begins with a brief ceremony in which Parker and [Dizzie] Gillespie receive awards from Down Beat magazine, but the clip above cuts straight to the music: a performance of the bebop standard “Hot House,” composed by Tad Dameron around the harmonic structure of Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love?”

Update from a reader:

The quote you ran about Charlie Parker’s heroin use made it sound (eventually) recreational. But that’s not my understanding. As per this link, his drug use wasn’t merely subsequent to breaking some ribs, but following a spine injury. I have a spine disease which can, at times, be quite painful. I can easily sympathize with some one who tries to manage his pain with whatever drug, and find condemnation of that management to stem from a lack of comprehension of the challenges that real chronic pain can present.

Imagine having teeth continually pulled without anesthetic. Now try to play an instrument or do math or do anything that requires concentration while enduring that pain. If Parker required heroin to do what he did, hats off to him. He changed the world.

In light of the recently revived interest in sexologists William Masters and Virginia Johnson – subjects of Showtime’s new series Masters of Sex – Jesse Bering calls attention to lesser-known sex researchers, such as Kurt Freund:

A prodigious theorist and researcher, Freund’s main claim to fame was his invention of the erection-detection machine (otherwise known as the “penile plethysmograph”). … In the early 1950s, Freund—a Holocaust survivor who’d somehow managed to avoid being deported to the concentration camps altogether during the Nazi occupation—was approached for help with a queer sort of problem by the Czechoslovakian army. Straight recruits were pretending to be gay to avoid their compulsory military service. It occurred to Freund that a soldier’s single dumb erection to a pretty naked lady, or the lack of one thereof, would betray his hidden sexual orientation. The specifics have gotten more complicated in the decades since his original erection-detection machine was patented, but the basics of the procedure have remained largely the same:

A man sits down in a chair, his penis is connected to an erection gauge that can pick up very subtle changes in penile tumescence (it’s so sensitive that it can detect a blood-volume increase of less than one cubic centimeter, which most men wouldn’t even experience consciously), and he’s then shown randomized images of nude models representing distinct erotic categories. The scientist, meanwhile, measures what’s happening with the man’s own equipment as these photographs appear.

A far cry from its initial purpose, Freund’s machine is today used mostly in forensic studies, ascertaining pedophilia in men arrested for sex crimes involving children.